Power vs. service

Katie van Schaijik | Mar 18, 2010

A quote from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (posted at the Corner by Andy McCarthy just now) expresses the cynical opposite of authentic personalism as well as the Christian gospel.

It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where “reconciliation” means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation[.]

Personalism seeks to replace the dynamics of power with the dynamics of love and service, because these are the only dynamics worthy of the dignity of persons, the ones we were made for, the ones in which we can flourish.